'There was Now in my Memory a “Before.”

"As regards fear of traces, fear of memory: We are always afraid of seeing ourselves suffer. It is like when we have an open wound: we are terribly afraid of looking at it… and at the same time we are perhaps the one person capable of looking at it. What do we fear?" - Helene Cixous

Amongst a host of psychoanalytic feminist theorists on the Lacanian mode, the fabulous four of Simone De Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray stand tall, strong and striking in their profound takes and pronouncements! For a reason at that! 

On an aside: Well, to Psychoanalytic feminists of the Lacanian order, the analysis of self-construction through discourse occupies very much a pivotal and a predominant place over and above the biological, and hence they are vociferous in their decree that, gender relations cannot be altered, unless and until the discursive frameworks based on language undergo a drastic transformation! So the urgent need and the dire demand for a changed language or an altered language! Yesss! Language in particular, since, these oppressive gender and sexual constructs, or rather these coercive gender and sexual constructs that were hitherto subtly woven, enmeshed and encoded within language, serve as strategies that still subordinate the woman in the scheme of things!

An insightful study on these fab four sure has the potential to yield forth a good dividend on their 'any many' convergences, and divergences as well!

This post would focus on just one such common point of reference that binds these fab four!

And that would be, the domain of Memory proper!

With Simone de Beauvoir, the senior most of them all, let’s start on our Memory sojourn!

Simone with Sartre!

We take off from her The Second Sex, where she alludes to a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ in her memory!

That whole night I tossed and turned in my bed. It was not possible. I was going to wake up. Mama was mistaken, it would go away and not come back again … The next day, secretly changed and stained, I had to confront the others. I looked at my sister with hatred because she did not yet know, because all of a sudden she found herself, unknown to her, endowed with an overwhelming superiority over me. Then I began to hate men, who would never experience this, and who knew. And then I also hated women who accepted it so calmly. I was sure that if they had been warned of what was happening to me, they would all be overjoyed. “So it’s your turn now,” they would have thought. That one too, I said to myself when I saw one. And this one too. I was had by the world. I had trouble walking and didn’t dare run. The earth, the sun-hot greenery, even the food, seemed to give off a suspicious smell … The crisis passed and I began to hope against hope that it would not come back again. One month later, I had to face the facts and accept the evil definitively, in a heavy stupor this time. There was now in my memory a “before.” All the rest of my existence would no longer be anything but an “after.”

In Letters to Françoise, Married, Marcel Prévost describes the young woman’s dismay upon her return from her honeymoon:

She thinks of her mother’s apartment with its Napoleon III and MacMahon furniture, its plush velvet, its wardrobes in black plum wood, everything she judged so old-fashioned, so ridiculous … In one instant all of that is evoked in her memory as a real haven, a true nest, the nest where she was watched over with disinterested tenderness, sheltered from all storms and danger. This apartment with its new-carpet smell, its unadorned windows, the chairs in disarray, its whole air of improvisation and haste, no; it is not a nest. It is only the place of the nest that has to be built … she suddenly felt horribly sad, as if she had been abandoned in a desert!

How much these ‘memories’ of her mother’s apartment, remind us of Kamala Das’s reminiscences on her grandmother’s house on a similar contextual background as such!

This concept of 'memories,' is dealt with in much detail, in her novel, The Mandarins!

The novel deals with the postwar France, after the Nazi occupation of France had ended! It’s liberation day for everyone in Paris as the Germans were chased out, in toto! Although Simone De Beauvoir herself denied with such an 'impish' vehemence that the novel was NOT a memoir at all, critics could easily see through the thin-veil, where Robert Dubreuilh stood for Sartre, Henri Perron for Albert Camus, and Anne Dubreuilh for Simone herself! And yesss! The novel deals with issues of false memory, as much as it does with issues regarding memory and forgetting! But some of the insights on memory worth a ponder are, to what extent should there be the impact of the 'pastness of the past' on the present, and on the future?

Well, to Simone De Beauvoire, if the ‘Past’ must needs be erased or destroyed with the avowed aim of saving the ‘Future,’ then it’s perfectly acceptable, and there’s nothing wrong to it at all! And with the existentialist streak innate in her, she is of the firm opinion that, only the person who makes the choice has the right and the liberty to determine its validity and its appropriateness based on the given situation!

Over to Julia Kristeva who comes second in line, on the fab four! 

Julia Kristeva

The term abject occupies a significant claim on her theoretical postulates! The very idea of the term abject, is something that is rejected by social reason, because of the communal consensus that underpins a social order!

To Kristeva, within the boundaries of the subject – to mean a part of oneself,  – and object – to mean something that exists independently of oneself – there resides pieces that were once categorized as a part of oneself or one's identity that has since been rejected, and that is called the abject. I quote from her book, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, on the concept of the abject, which, to Kristeva is ‘a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.’

Again, in her voluminous text, titled, The Sense And Non-Sense Of Revolt, translated by Jeanine Herman, in the very first chapter, she opens with a wonderful postulate on the roots of memory, which, according to her are nothing other than language and the unconscious! How much a role language plays in memory, as much the unconscious does!

I quote –

The title of this book is meant to evoke the current political state and the lack of revolt that characterizes it. I promise not to elude this aspect of the problem, but I will approach things from a bit of a distance: from the roots of memory, which is nothing other than language and the unconscious!

Simple and sweet! That makes her lines simply sweet!

And oooh boy! What a critique on culture she’s got on her! You cant help give a standing ovation to her way with words where she makes such an intense and raving sweep on culture, operated with vigour by power, thereby giving us all a falsified normalization! Wowww!

And this normalizing order, threatens its citizenry with a loss of memory!

I quote –

... the threat of the loss of memory that the normalizing order imposes on us.

It is not at all certain that a culture and art of revolt can see the light of day when prohibition and power have taken the forms of falsifiable normalization that I have described or when the individual has become a patrimonial ensemble of accessories with market value. If this is the case, who can revolt, and against what?

Can a patrimony of organs revolt against a normalizing order? How? Through remote-controlled images? If we want to talk about art and culture in this context, clarification is necessary: what culture are we talking about?

I do not have the answer, but I propose a reflection. I submit that past experience, the memory of it, and particularly the memory of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the fall of Communism, should make us attentive to our cultural tradition, which has advanced a thought and an artistic experience of the human subject. This subjectivity is coextensive to time—an individual’s time, history’s time, being’s time—more clearly and more explicitly than anywhere else. We are subjects, and there is time. From Bergson to Heidegger, from Proust to Artaud, Aragon, Sartre, Barthes, different figures of subjectivity have been thought out and put into words or given form in our contemporary culture.

Thirdly, let’s move on to Helene Cixous, the third amongst the fab four!

Helene's book, titled, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, translated with such profound and passionate vibrancy by Eric Prenowitz, is such a treat to read! It’s a medley of all hues and colours in 263 pages of insightful wisdom! I could see streaks of a Jidduji in her words and phrasings! The book opens with a candid interview of sorts that she does with Professor Calle-Gruber! Snippets from which I reproduce below -

Over to Helene Cixous for us all -

On the importance of life writing, and the boldness one needs to write one’s life, she has this to say –

As regards fear of traces, fear of memory: it is clearly a fear in the present. We are always afraid of seeing ourselves suffer. It is like when we have an open wound: we are terribly afraid of looking at it…and at the same time we are perhaps the one person capable of looking at it. What do we fear?

These fears can be understood and they can be not understood. They are what engenders a retreat, a flight before reality insofar as they are harrowing. And sometimes, in fleeing, it is life that we lose. We believe we’re saving our life, but we lose it. Because all the harrowing events are an integral part of life. And they constitute it. Julius Caesar: ‘Cowards die many times before their death’—and this is true. You die a thousand deaths before your death if you are afraid. And yet, everyone is cowardly!

To write only has meaning if the gesture of writing makes fear retreat.

Pain is always, unfortunately, stronger than everything. What happens is not the jubilation of writing; it is the strange feeling, the outpouring of joy we can have when we discover (and not only in writing): I ought to be dead and yet I am not dead. Or else: this death which ought to kill me did not kill me. It is the jubilation we feel to be still living, the excitement without pity of the narrow escape!

We ought to have the courage to tell ourselves something which can be disturbing: there is an infinite difference between brushing death and dying. At the moment when you cry out, when you say ‘I am going to die’, five words that belong to the always saved register of writing appear. It is to avow—to avow life. Let us say that I bear witness to it; that others bear witness to it.

For a long time I wondered what became of this in the concentration camps, when there is really every reason, every circumstance to be without hope, does there still remain this triumphant feeling—because it is a triumph! And then, meeting Resistance fighters and discovering works, I saw: yes, there is triumph up to the last minute. Up to the last second. Our true nobility: there is a resource in us, even when we are reduced, when we are crushed, when we are despised, annihilated, treated as people are treated in the camps, a resource which makes the poetic genius that is in every human being still resist. Still be capable of resisting. That depends on us!

‘If I am not already in my coffin,’ one says to oneself then, ‘it’s because my pain is not as great as I think it is.’ Not at all. It’s life which is greater than we think it is! In these moments, in any case, we are not the masters of writing: but the passivity comes to its limit: which is to say that we are in a state of activity. And furthermore, when we write in these circumstances, it’s because we are another person, we are the other. Perhaps I am going to die: but the other remains. In this situation, it is the other who writes.

Photo of a dream: Dream is capable of flashes of lightning—I would like to be able to take a photo of a dream.

After all, what do we do? We live, but why do we live? I think: to become more human: more capable of reading the world, more capable of playing it in all ways. This does not mean nicer or more humanistic. I would say: more faithful to what we are made from and to what we can create.

Yesss! Helene Cixous is a firebrand feminist of the psychoanalytic school! And not without reason!

Hail Helene! Hail her ilk!            

Next comes the fourth in line on the fabby four!

Luce Irigaray!

Luce Irigaray

To Luce Irigaray, within every individual is contained a genealogical sedimentation with its past, present, and future!

Gender or sex as a generative need!

Gender or sex as morphology and identity!

Thus two memories are in tension!

Genealogical memory, always bisexual,

Individual unisexual memory!

Gender as sex is always a transgression of genealogy and of its colours. Memory is a memory of each individual story; it is also a genealogical memory.

Our culture has forced us to repress the female genealogies. This means that we have entered into a kind of historical madness made up of:

Forms that are balanced by an artificial game of contradictions.

The repression that female genealogies have submitted to also seems to have favoured the privilege of codes, writing as arbitrary forms that would be capable of conveying meaning, doubling the voice, and submitting to it.

Psychoanalysts tend to think of memory as layer upon layer of catastrophes: images, words, gestures. They rarely define memory as the place where identity is formed, where each person builds his or her own ground or territory. Their idea of memory is negative in a way. BUT, as they proceed to intervene on events they class as pathogenic and secondary, psychoanalysts run the risk of undoing the whole weaving of identity.

To end or complete an analysis means, in my opinion, to give the other person back his or her ability to imagine; that is to say, the possibility of giving oneself time, and space-time. This cannot be done without imagination. 

From: Luce Irigaray: Key Writings, edited by Luce Irigaray (pgs 118, 119)

Interestingly, Luce Irigaray also seems to touch much on Heidegger, and expands on his concept of the four-fold, too! In this other book of hers titled, Luce Irigaray: Teaching, - a compilation that came up on her own initiative, - she also stresses on the need for listening, for attunement between two living beings who are totally different! Thus, the Heideggerian concept of ‘dwelling’ to her would connote to mean,

not simply the vertical dimension of under the sky and on the earth, nor even simply a belonging of humans’ being with one another, it also includes dwelling as a horizontal relation between two worlds: ‘to go towards the other, to welcome the other into oneself, open non-vertical dimensions in the relation to the human and to the divine’ What humans ‘must measure is thus neither linear, nor uniform, nor homogeneous’. Mortals are not only called to safeguard the earth as earth, letting earth be, they are also called to shelter the blossoming presencing of the other, which generates ‘spaces’…

Well, this book, all of 300 pages, is so interesting, mainly because, Luce Irigaray herself had taken on herself, this mighty initiative of bringing together under one umbrella, young academics from various countries, universities and disciplines, all of whom were carrying out research into her work. 

So giving y’all the blurb to this delightful read of Luce’s, titled Luce Irigaray: Teaching!

Blurb - 

Luce Irigaray: Teaching explores ways to confront new issues in education. Three essays by Irigaray herself present the outcomes of her own experiments in this area and develop proposals for teaching people how to coexist in difference, reach self-affection, and rethink the relations between teachers and students.

In the last few years, Irigaray has brought together young academics from various countries, universities and disciplines, all of whom were carrying out research into her work. These research students have received personal instruction from Irigaray and at the same time have learnt from one another by sharing with the group their own knowledge and experience. Most of the essays in this book are the result of this dynamic.

The central themes of the volume focus on five cultural fields: methods of recovery from traumatic personal or cultural experience; the resources that arts offer for dwelling in oneself and with the other(s); the maternal order and feminine genealogy; creative interpretation and embodiment of the divine; and new perspectives in philosophy. This innovative collaborative project between Irigaray and researchers involved in the study of her work gives a unique insight into the topics that have occupied this influential international theorist over the last thirty years.

In yet another interesting book of hers, titled, Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray puts forward the proposition that, female sexuality has remained an enigma, or a ‘dark continent,’ that’s both ‘unfathomable and unapproachable’!

Giving the blurb to two of her insightful reads –

First on Speculum of the Other Woman

Secondly on This Sex Which Is Not One

I quote -

Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray is incontestably one of the most important works in feminist theory to have been published in this generation. For the profession of psychoanalysis, Irigaray believes, female sexuality has remained a "dark continent," unfathomable and unapproachable; its nature can only be misunderstood by those who continue to regard women in masculine terms. In the first section of the book, "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry," Irigaray rereads Freud's essay "Femininity," and his other writings on women, bringing to the fore the masculine ideology implicit in psychoanalytic theory and in Western discourse in general: woman is defined as a disadvantaged man, a male construct with no status of her own.

In the last section, "Plato's Hystera," Irigaray reinterprets Plato's myth of the cave, of the womb, in an attempt to discover the origins of that ideology, to ascertain precisely the way in which metaphors were fathered that henceforth became vehicles of meaning, to trace how woman came to be excluded from the production of discourse. Between these two sections is "Speculum"—ten meditative, widely ranging, and freely associational essays, each concerned with an aspect of the history of Western philosophy in its relation to woman, in which Irigaray explores woman's essential difference from man.

Giving the blurb to the next read, that’s in content, a continuation of Speculum!

In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray elaborates on some of the major themes of Speculum of the Other Woman, her landmark work on the status of woman in Western philosophical discourse and in psychoanalytic theory, In eleven acute and widely ranging essays, Irigaray reconsiders the question of female sexuality in a variety of contexts that are relevant to current discussion of feminist theory and practice.

Among the topics she treats are the implications of the thought of Freud and Lacan for understanding womanhood and articulating a feminine discourse; classic views on the significance of the difference between male and female sex organs; and the experience of erotic pleasure in men and in women. She also takes up explicitly the question of economic exploitation of women; in an astute reading of Marx she shows that the subjection of woman has been institutionalized by her reduction to an object of economic exchange. Throughout Irigaray seeks to dispute and displace male-centered structures of language and thought through a challenging writing practice that takes a first step toward a woman's discourse, a discourse that would put an end to Western culture's enduring phallocentrism.

Making more direct and accessible the subversive challenge of Speculum of the Other Woman, this volume—skillfully translated by Catherine Porter (with Carolyn Burke)—will be essential reading for anyone seriously concerned with contemporary feminist issues.

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